Duane Michals

Appearing in 1970, Duane Michals’ Sequences became one of the key photography books of the decade. Michals’ (born 1932) concise narratives, typically composed of six or seven uncaptioned images, were surreal, provocative, mysterious and sometimes flat-out funny. They fueled a radically new direction for a generation of artists exploring the fictional potential of photography. Critic Jed Perl, reviewing a traveling retrospective organized by Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museums in 2014, called the sequences of small, black-and-white images “freshly minted fairy tales for adults. These surreal visual fables were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, when the museum was the arbiter of all things photographic. […] With [his] cosmic-comic sequences, Michals became photography’s genial troublemaker, seen by some as thumbing his nose at the lyric realism of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ and Alfred Stieglitz’s perfect prints. What can all too easily be underestimated is the quick, agile intelligence that Michals brought to his troublemaking. That’s what has given his dissident spirit its staying power.” Spanning half a century, Things Are Queer: 50 Years of Sequences brings together a generous selection of Michals’ sequences, including many that have never before been published.

"Please meet me in the circle of this conceit. These little fables of my imaginary theatrics repeat the mantras of Cavafy's desires and regrets: so old today, now gone away.”—Duane Michals
Duane Michals (born 1932) returns to the verse of 20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy for inspiration for his most recent work. Michals's images loosely illustrate Cavafy's poetry, while investigating themes of lost time, love discovered and remembered and the sublime realm of the surreal.

"As my consciousness spirals to its predestined disappearance, age has forced me to pay attention. Now I begin to see the silhouette of the mystery. I think about thinking and am beyond the comfort of conformity. I must ask questions that I never thought to ask before. The most profound questions seem to be transparent in their ordinariness and deceptive in their significance. A child would understand. I know that this modest enquiry must fail. But what else am I to do?" —Duane Michals (born 1932)

In Twin Palms' fourth book of Duane Michals' (born 1932) work, the artist explores classic themes of love and death through photographs and words. The evocative images and poems collected in Eros and Thanatos conjure memories of love and loss, lust and longing, in what is perhaps the most revealing and overtly sensual of Michals' works to date. The full richness of Michals' imagery emerges from these exquisite, large-format sheet-fed gravures.